Gary Rowett has opened up on the events that led to his shock Birmingham City sacking.
The football world was stunned on December 14, 2016, when Blues ruthlessly dismissed Rowett and replaced him with Gianfranco Zola. Blues were on the cusp of the play-off places in the Championship at the time and had just beaten Ipswich Town 2-1.
Results deteriorated under Zola and Blues nosedived down the table before Harry Redknapp’s late rescue act. Rowett joined Derby County later that season and led the Rams to a ninth-placed finish.
Almost seven years on, Rowett spoke openly on the Keep Right On podcast about Trillion Trophy Asia’s decision to sack him and the events which led up to his departure.
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“I didn’t know before the Ipswich game,” Rowett began. “I got a call the next day. I was due to have a meeting on Pride Park with a financial company and I can’t remember if it was Jules (Julia Shelton - former club secretary) who rang me and said, ‘The owners are over, they want to meet you’. I said I had a meeting. ‘No, they want to meet you at 11 O'clock.’
“I hung up and asked if they could do it at one O'clock, but my missus said maybe you should just go. I cancelled my meeting and went. I wasn’t sure what it was about.
“People in football are usually outraged by the decision but usually when you’re on the inside you know there’s little things going on. I had just been offered a new contract but I had turned it down for different reasons, it wasn’t because I wanted to leave. There was this thing around at the time that I wanted to leave and I was speaking to other clubs or whatever, but it’s really simple as a manager. I had a clause in my contract and if a club paid it and I wanted to go, I could go and nobody could stop me. If I wanted to go, I would have gone. And there was a lot of outside interest from other clubs because we had done a good job.
“I turned up at the meeting and there were two representatives from the club, not the new owners, and they gave me the news. I understand it because they want to do it in person. A club doesn’t want a manager to say they sacked me by text or over the phone. The only thing I asked at the time was to let me tell the players and staff myself. I drove over from the ground to Wast Hills to tell the lads and the staff, they were in a little bit of shock.
“That was how it was done. I can’t go into too much detail as I’m sure you’re aware, but that was more or less it. It was a shock to a certain degree but it wasn’t completely a shock when I look back. I think I made mistakes around that time as well, I’ll be open enough to admit that. Maybe I could have been more patient and dealt with it in a different way, but we wanted to get to the next level quickly and sometimes you end up battling things rather than accepting certain things are out of your control.”
